The man who disciplined Queen Victoria's favourite son

12:01AM BST 21 Jun 2007

Saul David reviews The Queen's Knight: The Extraordinary Life of Queen Victoria's Most Trusted Confidant by Martyn Downer

The inside story of the late-Victorian court has been told before, most recently in William Kuhn's life of Henry Ponsonby, the queen's private secretary from 1870-95. But this new biography of the colourful but relatively unknown Sir Howard Elphinstone, military governor to the queen's favourite son Arthur, has several key advantages: it spans a broader period (including, crucially, the last few years of Prince Albert's life); it contains more new material; and its central character is far more interesting than Ponsonby.

Born in 1829 on a Latvian country estate, the great-grandson of a Scottish naval officer who distinguished himself in the service of Catherine the Great, Elphinstone was 15 when his cosmopolitan parents settled in Devon. For reasons of economy his three elder brothers were serving in India, but Elphinstone was allowed to join the Royal Engineers because a young officer in that corps 'could now live on his pay'.

He was posted to Edinburgh and lodged for a time with another young Engineer, Anthony Durnford, who would go down in history as the man responsible for the disastrous British defeat at Isandlwana in the Zulu War of 1879. Most historians regard Durnford as hard done by; Downer is not so sure. 'Durnford's Celtic blood and bouts of heavy drinking', he writes, 'could make him short-tempered and prone to melancholy; and his dangerous love of gambling was to lead directly to his violent and celebrated death.'

One of the oddities of Elphinstone's life is the number of times his path crosses that of famous but ill-fated soldiers. Another was the Prince Imperial, the son of the deposed French Emperor Napoleon III, who was also killed in Zululand; but the spookiest connection was with Charles 'Chinese' Gordon who found God in Elphinstone's house, and who later agreed an exchange of postings that was to lead inexorably to his death at Khartoum in 1885.

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Not that Elphinstone's own military career was without merit. He won a retrospective Victoria Cross for rescuing wounded soldiers in the Crimea - though the role of court 'influence' cannot be discounted - and later rose to the rank of major-general. How much further this talented and resourceful officer (he passed out first at Woolwich) could have gone if he had not joined the royal household in 1859 is open to speculation. But soldier-courtiers rarely reached the top of their profession because they had so few opportunities to distinguish themselves in battle.

So why did Elphinstone give up a promising career for a relatively minor, and not especially lucrative, post at court? Downer suggests he was influenced by his friends, and that the social advantages were only of interest to his snobbish father. But at least one - albeit 'interested' - party suspected that Elphinstone would 'take advantage' of his position at court 'to forward' his family's claim to a vacant noble title.

Whatever his motives, Elphinstone was never less than a diligent and hard-working royal servant, supervising Prince Arthur's moral and practical education with an almost evangelical zeal. His willingness to use corporal punishment provoked frequent clashes with Arthur's doting mother and even, on occasions, his father. But Victoria and Albert were never in any doubt that he had his young charge's best interests at heart.

Downer's book gives a fascinating insight into life at court, with its knot of permanent courtiers (Elphinstone included) 'surrounded by a revolving cast of aristocratic equerries, ladies in waiting and maids of honour'. Below these elite members of the royal household were the lesser employees - doctors, governesses, tutors and librarians - who 'ate alone in their rooms'.

Rivalries and jealousies were inevitable, and never more so than when John Brown, 'a large, taciturn Highlander with watchful eyes and a face apparently hewn from granite', entered the Queen's service after Albert's death in 1861. Downer charts the ex-ghillie's growing influence at court, but absolves him of a full-blown sexual relationship with the Queen. 'In reality,' he writes, 'betraying her husband's memory in any physical sense would have revolted her.'

Victoria does not emerge from this first-rate book with too much credit. Her judgement seems suspect, and her over-reliance on her husband (and subsequent over-reaction to his death) suggests that her own achievements have been inflated. But she was generous towards her favoured courtiers, and rewarded Elphinstone's loyalty with a knighthood and a pension.

While working at Sotheby's in 2001, Martyn Downer had the good fortune to come across the cache of Nelson artefacts and papers that formed the basis for his excellent debut book, Nelson's Purse. That luck continues, because his wife is Elphinstone's great-great-granddaughter, a family connection that gave Downer access to the hitherto unseen Elphinstone papers.

Yet he has not stinted his other archival research and the end result is a superb portrait of a complicated and fascinating man who played a key role at the very heart of Victoria's court for more than 30 years. The Queen herself acknowledged his importance when she wrote after his death at sea: 'What I too have lost I cannot say! Few if any gentleman ever were on such confidential terms with me as dear excellent Sir Howard.'